What is the difference between gopher and wais

Skip to: content search login. Knowledge Base Toggle local menu Menus About the team. Knowledge Base Search. Log in. Options Help Chat with a consultant. Include archived documents. This content has been archived , and is no longer maintained by Indiana University. Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable. Gopher clients use ports above WAIS clients use random ports above WAIS servers usually use port , but sometimes don't; see the discussion of nonstandard server ports earlier, in the section on HTTP.

As a straightforward single-connection protocol with plenty of user-specified information, WAIS lends itself to both modified-client and modified-procedure proxying. Summary of Recommendations for Gopher and WAIS If you're going to run a Gopher server, carefully configure the Gopher server to control what it has access to; in particular, watch out for ways that someone could upload a program to a Gopher system somehow via mail or FTP, for example and then execute it via the Gopher server.

RealAudio and RealVideo All rights reserved. Gopher and WAIS Gopher is a menu-driven text-based tool for browsing through files and directories across the Internet. When a user selects a Gopher menu item, Gopher retrieves the specified file and displays it appropriately. Standalone Gopher clients are now rare, but many web browsers support the Gopher protocol, and Gopher servers can be an efficient way of providing access to non-HTML documents for users of web browsers.

Gopher servers are therefore susceptible to the same kinds of problems as HTTP servers: Can an attacker trick the auxiliary program? Can the attacker upload a new auxiliary program and cause it to be run? Direction Source Addr.